With the growing possibilities offered by new technologies and their increasing usage, many prevention campaigns now use social media and mobile applications as key platforms on which to build the initiatives. In some cases this has meant converting campaigns from more traditional platforms onto new media in order to expand their reach, whilst in other cases the technology offers new and creative opportunities to deliver messages to the places where consumers wish to be informed. Since many campaigns integrate online and mobile tools fully into comprehensive campaigns that use a wider range of traditional and new media, both above and below the line, this section of the report solely relates to activities that are based exclusively or predominantly around the digital or mobile tool.

Enhancing the power of social media to create communities against drink driving in Poland

The online Responsible Drivers Club (www.klubdrivera.pl) was built on the foundations of a first recruitment drive that took place during face-to-face activities in pubs and bars in Poland. The objective of the Club is to build a community of responsible drivers who never drink and drive and can diffuse the message of the designated driver concept.

In 2012 the Polish Brewers switched activities to social media, setting up a Facebook group with the objective to create a real trend for designated driving, especially among young adults. Apart from ongoing activities (daily posts, discussions), educational contests have been prepared for the followers, such as one dedicated to traffic regulations and another to a communally created list of “10 rules for a responsible driver”. The group features unique and creative content including videos, graphics, virtual events and other contests with prizes to be won.

In 2013, activities included daily posting of subject-related links, pictures and polls, with an average 2 to 4 posts per day on safe driving, sober driving, associated campaigns, traffic regulations and news, with Facebook ad campaigns run once or twice per quarter, promoting particular posts. A “DRIver’s driving license” contest engaged 4,000 participants and 5,200 new followers through a task to challenge one’s Facebook friend to quickly and correctly answer three questions from the official driving license test, with prizes including car camcorders. A contest challenging fans to find, film and post road absurdities in Poland was supported by Beata Bublewicz MP, president of the Parliamentary Group for Road Safety.

In 2014, the campaign focused on the “I don’t drink and drive” message using fans’ videos, pictures, graphics and contests, with the fanpage focused over six months on promoting it and communicating progress. Since the end of 2014, activities on the Driver’s Club Facebook profile have been successfully continued with engagement of fans in discussions and contests as well as the number of new fans of the profile (which significantly exceeded former assumptions and is constantly growing) show increasing social awareness and endorsement for the idea of sober driving. The fan page of the Club had attained 1700 followers by June 2012, grew to over 15 000 by end February 2013 (with 10% regularly involved in discussions and comments) and contained nearly 30,000 fans by end 2015, far beyond the 10,000 fan target set at the start of the initiative, with the level of interactivity also far exceeding the objective originally set.

The Responsible Drivers Club profile on Facebook is the largest Polish community built around sober driving and the second largest on road safety. The Club was presented at a joint ETSC – Polish Motor Transport Institute (ITS) workshop in Warsaw in 2016. This was the fifth national workshop of the SMART project, a three-year partnership between The Brewers of Europe and the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC).

“Test Your BAC” is an initiative of Kompania Piwowarska in Poland to discourage drinking and driving and eliminate drunk drivers on the Polish roads, by promoting consumer awareness of the impact of alcohol on the human body and by giving people a chance to check their blood alcohol content. A mobile phone application which measures expected BAC after having consumed various kinds of alcohol has been made available. It also has other useful functions: it enables a cab to be called from one of 300 taxi corporations across the whole of Poland; and includes databases with information about the legal blood alcohol limits in various European countries. The application was endorsed by Regional Road Traffic Police and Taxi Corporations. Only by May 2012 the app had been downloaded over 50,000 times, whilst also being awarded prizes in the prestigious Golden Arrow Contest in the category for mobile marketing. In 2013 a new version of this application was developed for Windows Phones and existing applications for Androids and iPhones were updated.

In Romania the mobile phone / sms and web application of Ursus is called “ZeroLaMie” and also allows consumers to measure the expected BAC after having consumed various kinds of alcohol. It promotes awareness of the amount of alcohol consumed and discourages consumers from driving when they have consumed alcohol. The tool has the support of the National Traffic Police and the National Institute of Legal Medicine. In 2013, the application was further developed into a downloadable version, both for AppStore and Google Play platforms.

Finally, in Slovakia, Pivovary Topvar continued its “Meet Your Guardian Angels” campaign, by updating the ProMile – http://www.promileinfo.sk – BAC calculator for Android phones, whilst a new ProMile Lady application was developed as part of a multi-faceted education campaign built in cooperation with the NGO Oz Prima and the Ministry of Transport.